THE Iraqi Oil Ministry has pre-qualified 41 IOCs (international oil companies) to bid in Iraq’s next upstream licence bidding round, which will focus on exploration acreage.
The bidding round was to have been staged mid-year, but has been delayed into January 2012, as a model contract configured to compensate companies for the additional geological risk inherent in exploration deals has yet to be brought forward.
The upcoming round will comprise 12 exploration blocks. Iraq hopes to add 10billion barrels of oil to its reserves, as well as 29trillion cu ft of gas.
The country’s official reserves currently stand at 143billion barrels of oil and 112.6trillion cu ft of gas.
The pre-qualified companies include: Occidental; Chevron; ExxonMobil and Hess; LUKoil; Bashneft; Rosneft; Gazprom and TNK-BP; Total; BP; Premier Oil and Anglo-Dutch Shell.
Statoil; Pakistan Petroleum; Petrovietnam; CNPC, Sinopec and CNOOC, all of China; Petronas; KOGAS; ONGC; Pertamina; PTT; Sonangol; TPAO; Eni and Edison; Mubadala and Kuwait Energy have also pre-qualified.
And so have INA; EGPC; ATPECO; Inpex; Itochu; Japex; JOGMEC; JX Nippon Oil and Gas; Mitsubishi Corp.; Mitsui and Sumitomo.
According to analysts at IHS, the list of pre-qualified companies does not differ much from previous lists, with many of the IOCs having pre-qualified earlier and electing to remain in the group of companies eligible for bidding.
However, they said that Iraq had “slightly changed” the criteria ahead of pre-qualification, lowering the requirement for large asset operational experience from earlier rounds, which focused on existing oil and gas discoveries needing development, to concentrate instead on exploration experience.
IHS said: “Many of the companies have, however, signalled that they will only take a firm decision on whether to bid or not after studying the yet to be published model contract, with Iraq’s licensing rounds so far seeing few of the pre-qualified companies actually engage in bidding.”